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they were looking for.
The terrified official from the Swiss consulate who had taken Mulrooney back from the barracks to bis hotel had told him there had been rumors of an attempt on the President's life and the troops were looking for a missing senior officer who was presumed to be responsible.

Four days after leaving the port of Clarence, Jack Mulrooney, still nursemaiding his rock samples, arrived back at Luton, England, aboard a chartered aircraft. A truck took his samples away for analysis at Watford, and after a checkout by the company doctor he was allowed to start his three weeks' leave. He went to spend it with his sister in Dulwich and within a week was thoroughly bored.

Exactly three weeks later to the day, Sir James Man-son, Knight of the British Empire, chairman and managing director of Manson Consolidated Mining Com-
pany Limited, leaned back in his leather armchair in the penthouse office suite on the tenth floor of his company's London headquarters, glanced once more at the report in front of him and breathed, "Jesus Christ."
He rose from behind the broad desk, crossed the room to the picture windows on the south face, and gazed down at the sprawl of the City of London, the inner square mile of the ancient capital and heart of a financial empire that was still worldwide, despite what its detractors said. To some of the scuttling beetles in somber gray, topped by black bowler hats, it was perhaps a place of employment only, boring, wearisome, exacting its toll of a man, his youth, his manhood, his middle age, until final retirement. For others, young and hopeful, it was a palace of opportunity, where merit and hard work were rewarded with the prizes of advancement and security. To romantics it was no doubt the home of the houses of the great merchant-adventurers, to a pragmatist the biggest market in the world, and to a left-wing trade unionist a place where the idle and worthless rich, born to wealth and privilege, lolled at ease in luxury. James Manson was a cynic and a realist. He knew what the City was; it was a jungle pure and simple, and in it he was one of the panthers.
A born predator, he had nevertheless realized early that there were certain rules that needed to be publicly revered and privately ripped to shreds; that, as in politics, there was only one commandment, the eleventh, "Thou shalt not be found out." It was by obeying the first requirement that he had acquired his knighthood in the New Year's Honours List a month before. This had been proposed by the Conservative Party (ostensibly for services to industry, but in reality for secret contributions to party funds for the general election), and accepted by the Wilson government because of his support for its policy on Nigeria. And it was by fulfilling the second requirement that he had made his fortune and now, holding twenty-five per cent of the
stock of his own mining corporation and occupying the penthouse floor, was a millionaire several times over.
He was sixty-one, short, aggressive, built like a tank, with a thrusting vigor and a piratical ruthlessness that women found attractive and competitors feared. He had enough cunning to pretend to show respect for the establishments of both the City and the realm, of commercial and political life, even though he was aware that both organs were rife with men of almost complete moral unscrupulousness behind the public image. He had collected a few on his board of directors, including two former ministers in Conservative administrations. Neither was averse to a fat supplementary fee over and above director's salary, payable in the Cayman Islands or Grand Bahama—and one, to Manson's knowledge, enjoyed the private diversion of waiting at table upon three or four leather-clad tarts, himself dressed in a maid's cap, a pinafore, and a bright smile. Manson regarded both men as useful, possessing the advantage of considerable influence and superb connections without the inconvenience of integrity. The